Searching For Cultural Integration

Among all Chinese American writers, Maxine Hong Kingston is unquestionably the most famous one. The representative work of Kingston, The Woman Warrior, establishes her status in the history of Chinese American literature. To some extent, she paves the ways for other ethnic minority female writers to seek the road towards integration.The experiences of living in Chinatown become the sources for Kingston's later writing. Her mother's "talk story" tradition also helps Kingston to develop her own style of storytelling and writing. Kingston lives in the circumstance of both Chinese culture and American culture; this experience also influences her deeply and provides her with the colorful materials for her later writing.In The Woman Warrior, Kingston depicts the plight and suffering experiences of women both in the traditional Chinese misogynist culture and the mainstream white American society. It is known to all that Chinese American women are confronted with multiple oppressions in white-dominated American society; they are the "Other" and outsiders to the whites. Influenced by Chinese culture and American culture simultaneously, Chinese American women are grappled with a dilemma, namely, they live in a Chinese family with Chinese culture, but study and receive education of American culture. They are marginalized and silenced in American racial society and they are always confused by this between-world condition. Kingston writes the cultural conflicts between the East and the West through the conflicts and misunderstandings between mother and daughter. Because of receiving different values, mother and daughter can not understand each other. For the mothers, the traditional Chinese culture is ingrained in their minds and they want to impose it on their daughters. However, the American-born daughters regard Chinese culture as incomprehensive and weird, only American culture is new and civilized.This thesis will focus on cultural integration from the perspective of post-colonial feminism, for it is about Chinese American women who suffer not only from gender oppression but also from racial oppression. They should combine gender problem with racial one. Being a minority and a female at the same time is a tragedy for Chinese American women. There are many knotty problems for them to confront with when seeking cultural integration, but they can overcome them and search for an identity which is suitable for them.There are four chapters in this thesis. The first chapter is an introduction to Maxine Hong Kingston and her most famous work The Woman Warrior and the post-colonial feminism; the second chapter deals with the problems faced by Chinese American women when they are searching for cultural integration in The Woman Warrior; the third chapter is about the approaches of searching for cultural integration in The Woman Warrior; the fourth chapter is the conclusion of this thesis.Through analyzing the cultural integration, we can get to know that Kingston expresses her ideal of the harmonious relationship between eastern culture and western culture and the special identity for them, namely, the ethnic cultural identity. The best for Chinese American women to do is to absorb the essences of these two different cultures and to discard the uselessness rather than one culture conflicts with the other. Only through the understanding and negotiation can different cultures exist harmoniously.